I’m Writing a New Book Every Month

Amy Jo — who has re-opened From a Corner Table, by the way — forwarded a link to Write-a-Go-Go, a site which challenges people to write 36,000 words in 3 months.

Welcome to your new challenge. Ready? 36,000 words sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? 144 manuscript pages? But when you break it down to 1,000 words, three times a week, isn’t that something you can do?

This got me to wondering: is it something I can do? Is it something I already do? I don’t know. But because I’m a geek, I knew could find out. A little digging turned up a word count plugin for WordPress. I installed it and voila! Now I have word count stats at GRS.

I average 29,300 words per month at Get Rich Slowly. It’s not as easy to use plugins with Moveable Type, so I’m not going to try to calculate my word count here. I suspect it used to be in the 25,000 word per month range but has probably fallen to around 15,000 words per month. Do I write another 5,000 words per month at my other sites? Probably. I think it’s safe to say that I’m publishing 50,000 words per month. I’m writing 1,500 words per day. (I’m actually probably writing double that — I figure half of what I write never sees the light of day.)

How much is 50,000 words per month in real-world terms? According to this guide to average manuscript lengths, novels are generally between 25,000 and 150,000 words. A 50,000 word novel would be 200 pages long. I’m writing the equivalent of a 200-page book every month.

Holy shit.

Now, there are a lot of considerations that go into writing a book that I’m not having to cope with. Short articles are much different than a book-length manuscript. I’m not saying that one is harder or that one is easier — they’re just different.